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Blogathon for SSA Week: Imaginative Star Tattoos?

This post continues my leg of the Blogathon for SSA Week! From now until 9pm PDT, I will write one new blog post every hour. Plus, for every $100 raised during that time, I will post one new picture of our cats! And all donations will be matched by SSA Supporters Jeff Hawkins and Janet Strauss — so whatever you donate, it will be doubled!

So I’m thinking of getting another tattoo. A set of them, actually, to commemorate my surgical scars (five of them, I had laparoscopic surgery, so I have five little scars instead of one big one). I’m thinking of getting stars, one on each scar, so the set of them looks like sort of like a constellation.

But I don’t want the stars to just look like regular five-pointed pentagram stars. I want them to look more interesting than that, more imaginative. I’m not a designer, though. So I’m crowdsourcing this: Does anyone with tattoo experience — or heck, without it — have ideas on how to do a star tattoo, or a series of star tattoos, that are clearly identifiable as stars, but don’t just look like pentagrams?

If it helps, you can see the scars (four of the five, anyway), and where they’re situated on my body — not great, but you can see them — in this picture. It’s the one where I’m half-naked with the word “MINE” written on my torso in lipstick, the one I did in support of Tunisian anti-theocratic activist Amina. They’re in an arc across my belly and above my belly button, with one more dipping down just below my waistband.

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Lately I’ve seen several star tats where the star is defined by shading outside of it, without an explicit outline. This image isn’t quite it, but it’s close. Perhaps a band of color, gradating through the spectrum, with the stars “shining” through it?

[Googling “star tattoos” brings up images that make me think tattooists should be strictly regulated; dang, there’s some aesthetic clusterfucks out there]

I actually do have a constellation on my back – it’s my Zodiac, Sagittarius. It has 21 stars of different shapes and sizes. Some are larger, or have more/less points. All of them are black outline with dark blue inside… It took several hours of consultation with a tattoo artist, but we finally got it right and I really love it. Goes nicely with the archer on my leg. 🙂

I wish I had a picture of it, but I’m not sure my whole back should be on the internets anyway.